Tuesday, October 25, 2016

3D Population Towers

There have been quite a few examples recently of interactive maps created using Mapbox GL's extrusion property to make 3d buildings (including buildings with light and shade, the Vancouver Zoning Map map and the Toronto Zoning Map). All of these maps use the height data in the buildings layer of the map style to visualize buildings in 3d.

The new extrusion property can also be used with your own data layers in Mapbox GL. For example Mapbox has released a map of US population density which visualizes the population density of each census block as a 3d tower. The Population Density Inspector allows you to explore the number of people living in each census block in America. The height of each census block on the map represents the population density (based on census block population counts).

You can read about how Mapbox created the map (with a little help from Turf.js and Tippecanoe) on the Mapbox blog.